/* * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium, * * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. * * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231 */ package org.w3c.dom; /** * CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing characters that * would otherwise be regarded as markup. The only delimiter that is * recognized in a CDATA section is the "]]>" string that ends the CDATA * section. CDATA sections cannot be nested. Their primary purpose is for * including material such as XML fragments, without needing to escape all * the delimiters. *

The CharacterData.data attribute holds the text that is * contained by the CDATA section. Note that this may contain characters that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and * that, depending on the character encoding ("charset") chosen for * serialization, it may be impossible to write out some characters as part * of a CDATA section. *

The CDATASection interface inherits from the * CharacterData interface through the Text * interface. Adjacent CDATASection nodes are not merged by use * of the normalize method of the Node interface. *

No lexical check is done on the content of a CDATA section and it is * therefore possible to have the character sequence "]]>" * in the content, which is illegal in a CDATA section per section 2.7 of [XML 1.0]. The * presence of this character sequence must generate a fatal error during * serialization or the cdata section must be splitted before the * serialization (see also the parameter "split-cdata-sections" * in the DOMConfiguration interface). *

Note: Because no markup is recognized within a * CDATASection, character numeric references cannot be used as * an escape mechanism when serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken * when serializing a CDATASection with a character encoding * where some of the contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to * do so would not produce well-formed XML. *

Note: One potential solution in the serialization process is to * end the CDATA section before the character, output the character using a * character reference or entity reference, and open a new CDATA section for * any further characters in the text node. Note, however, that some code * conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return an error or * exception when a character is missing from the encoding, making the task * of ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization more difficult. *

See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification. */ public interface CDATASection extends Text { }